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For programmers today, an option to consider is to use plain TeX directly, by writing in Markdown or whatever, and generating the `.tex` file via a preprocessor program. After all, the facilities that LaTeX was written to provide (automatic section numbering, references, etc) can just as well (or even, more sanely) be done outside the TeX engine.
There is a catch or two:
• Writing the preprocessor will still be a bit of work — I think a promising approach is to use Pandoc, but no one has yet merged a plain TeX writer into the Pandoc repo (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/4341 — I was briefly interested a couple of years ago, and may look into it again: it doesn't seem like a lot of work honestly).
• The main reason people use LaTeX is because of all the packages in its ecosystem that do various tweaks to the typesetting. (This is also the main problem with LaTeX: TeX itself is good; LaTeX itself is mostly fine; it's the menagerie of packages of varying quality and conflicting effects that cause all the problems that LaTeX users usually complain about.) And in the LaTeX ecosystem, there does not exist a culture of teaching how to do things without the package (just as "You might not need jQuery" is not written by the jQuery authors), so if some LaTeX package looks attractive to you, you're back to LaTeX package hell. I have some ideas here of making it easier to "steal" from a LaTeX package by showing the equivalent "generated" TeX, but they require a bit of work hacking on the TeX engine, and have never got around to it.
Anyway, in the meantime, writing in Markdown and using Pandoc to generate a LaTeX file remains a good approach IMO.
> How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting.
To add to this, I personally prefer using semantic linefeeds — adding a newline after each sentence or clause (as in e.g. [0] [1]). I find this works exceptionally well with LaTeX, since I get the benefit of the newlines as I write and edit, while the typeset version is formatted nicely into paragraphs for me.
(Not that this is unique to LaTeX, of course; Markdown would be no different. The technique works well with all such tools.)
[0] https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
[1] https://sembr.org/
I agree that on modern hardware recompiling is pretty fast. I have a 445 page book (https://gitlab.com/jim.hefferon/toc) with more than a graphic per page and lots of code inclusion, cross references, etc. The command "time pdflatex book" gives this on my 2016 laptop under Ubuntu.
real 0m18.159s